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No Fault, Driver Responsibility, and Crash/Fatality Rates ?

The U.S. has the most dangerous roads of all developed countries. We have more crashes, injuries, and fatalities than any other country whether measured per capita or per mile driven. For instance, per capita we have over 3 times as many fatalities as The Netherlands, nearly 6 times as many debilitating injuries, and over 11 times as many crashes*.

This is most often attributed to poor U.S. road design. How much though might be due to insurance and in particular no-fault insurance?

In one incident a driver (A) was doing a zipper merge where construction closed the right lane. The car in the left lane that he was merging in to and was behind him (B) choose to speed up and pull around driver A to prevent him from merging in. As a result, driver B clipped the front of driver A's car with his rear. The insurance companies initially settled with 100% fault for driver A based on driver B having had legal possession of the lane. Only because driver A pursued the matter and obtained video evidence was fault changed to 90% driver B and 10% driver A and even this required considerable pushing by drive A.

Without driver A pushing, driver B would have gotten away with being aggressive and dangerous with no consequences. Similarly very few incidents of drivers hitting pedestrians or bicycle riders in the U.S. result in any charges or punishment for the driver.

How are such situations handled in other countries? Are they handled differently and so result in drivers being more cautious and thus fewer crashes, injuries, and fatalities? Is a crash elsewhere treated more seriously? Would police or investigators be more likely to come?

* Per km driven we have 2.1 times as many fatalities, 5.5 times as many debilitating injuries, and 9 times as many crashes.

Where did you get those number? According to Wikipedia, while we're bad, we're not that bad. The Netherlands has about 4.5 fatalities per billion vehicle km driven, we have about 7.1 and Belgium, Spain, Japan, and S. Korea among others are worse.

Rather than differences in insurance laws, I suspect very rigorous driver training and testing as well as serious drunk driving penalties and enforcement have more to do with their better statistics.

Data come from the preliminary 2017 interim OECD IRTAD report (2015 data, 2016 preliminary data). Wikipedia is likely the 2015 report (2013 data, 2014 prelim data). I believe the U.S. is dead last in both reports for road fatalities per capita and for all modes km travelled. The biggest difference is that the U.S. had a very high 2015 and preliminary data indicate a much worse 2016 while other developed countries continued to improve. Generally the U.S. has lagged all other developed countries since at least 1968 except for two years when Greece was worse.

The fatalities per billion vehicle km on wikipedia is an inaccurate measure as it divides all fatalities by only motor vehicle km. This measure looks better for the U.S. because we have the highest motor vehicle modal share in the world and we also drive more than others so you end up with a very high denominator for the U.S. and an inaccurately low, and sometimes grossly inaccurately low, denominator for other countries as it does not include walking and bicycling which are much higher modal shares than in the U.S. An accurate measure looks at each mode individually, e.g., fatalities of those in motor vehicles by motor vehicle km, bicycle fatalities by bicycle km travelled, pedestrian fatalities by km walked. These can then be viewed individually or aggregated. Either way the U.S. comes out on the bottom (though Greece and Chili have come close).

Better training and lower drunk driving are certainly contributors. If you completely eliminate drunk driving from all countries (about 32% for U.S., 7.1% for NL, etc.) the U.S. is still well behind, though the gap narrows a bit.

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